Why The Shining Haters Are Wrong

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece is a personal film, after all

Canadian body-horror master David Cronenberg, in an interview last week with the Toronto Star's Peter Howell, spoke at length about his feelings toward the late Stanley Kubrick. His observations were contentious, to say the least:

"I think I'm a more intimate and personal filmmaker than Kubrick ever was. That's why I find The Shining not to be a great film. I don't think he understood the genre. I don't think he understood what he was doing. There were some striking images in the book and he got that, but I don't think he really felt it. In a weird way, although he's revered as a high-level cinematic artist, I think he was much more commercial-minded and was looking for stuff that would click and that he could get financed. I think he was very obsessed with that, to an extent that I'm not. Or that Bergman or Fellini were."

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Now, leaving aside that rather bizarre assertion about Kubrick's commercial motivations — an argument I might refute by pointing to, say, anything in the movie — Cronenberg's statements are worth considering further. It seems to me that, while I consider The Shining among the greatest horror films ever made, there may be something to the claim that it isn't especially intimate or personal, as Cronenberg suggests. It may even be that, indeed, Stanley Kubrick gravitated to the Stephen King novel for reasons that had little to do with what ought to be "felt" in it. Two questions therefore present themselves: 1) Is The Shining a personal horror film?, and, if not, 2) Does a horror film need to be personal to be considered great?

The answers strike me as importantly related. Let's define "personal," in this context, as an expression of something meaningful to the artist — which is to say that a personal film is one into which the thoughts and feelings of the director have been channeled. For example, Roman Polanski's Macbeth is personal insofar as it deals with the emotional fallout of his wife's then-recent murder, and Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt is personal in the sense that it restages the boating accident which had long ago claimed the life of his son. These, of course, are examples in the extreme — deeply felt works animated by unthinkable tragedy, personal because in a way they needed to be. Cases of this kind are rare. David Cronenberg has, by my count, one such film to his name: 1979's The Brood, made in the wake of his difficult divorce and fueled by his anger and resentment. I think that The Brood is an exceptional film, and a terrifying one, precisely because of the personal pain it taps into and coveys. The film's sense of intimacy made it great.

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But David Cronenberg is responsible for a number of other great horror films, none of which has quite the same type or degree of personal feeling. What they offer, instead, is a reflection of a more universal feeling. They express shared social and cultural anxieties, the sort of fear to which many of us can acutely relate. Videodrome, my favorite of the director's films, may in fact have some kind of private resonance for Cronenberg. But the reason it resonates with others is that it articulates a more general fear of the technological, of the pervasive influence of television and the feeling that we are losing control to an encroaching media dominance. You don't get the impression that Cronenberg personally underwent a crisis like the one suffered by the protagonist of the film, and you don't have to in order to find its emotional and psychological dimension affecting — you only need to sense that the crisis at its core means something in a more general way, that the filmmaker believed in it and cared as much about it as the effects and scares with which it's furnished. And that proves easy.

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When Cronenberg describes himself as an intimate and personal filmmaker, I think what he means is that he approaches his work from an emotional perspective: He wants the audience to care because he cares. The contrast would be, say, a work-for-hire project, done soullessly and without much interest — and as horror goes there are plenty of those crowding out multiplexes each October. But this quality of emotional truth, of being about something terrifying and real, is common to all of the great horror films, from Dawn of the Dead (rampant consumerism) to The Thing (Cold War paranoia). Horror, by its very nature, reflects the anxieties of its maker; the genre is a vehicle not only for monsters and maniacs but for a very personal sort of fear.

And so the question remains: When Stanley Kubrick set out to make The Shining, did he have that personal sort of fear in mind? Well, it's rather difficult to speculate about Kubrick's own fears and anxieties, but what is obvious while watching The Shining — and what remains most significant — is that the film itself reflects an emotional and psychological truth. The real fear at the heart of The Shining is a personal one, which is to say that it relates not to hauntings and psychic powers but to how real people live and are damaged: Its core is Jack Torrence, an emotionally and sometimes physically abusive father, husband, and reformed alcoholic. That, too, was the core of the book, and its emphasis in the film is not incidental; you never get the sense, watching the film, that Kubrick cared more about the commercial appeal of his window dressings than the emotional journey of the characters. The film is all about characters. It upsets and disconcerts because of how intensely true they feel, how fully realized their lives are before anything overtly fantastic begins to intrude.

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It's often said that the weakness of bad horror is in character — that the teens sliced and mangled in slashers never feel remotely real. The opposite is true of The Shining. Its people are not disposable, and they are not beleaguered by some mysterious or faceless killer in the woods. Stanley Kubrick made a film about a family that turns against itself, about a patriarch who snaps and whose demise, it's suggested, is not so much caused by the hotel and its ghostly inhabitants as simply accelerated by them. Does it matter if Kubrick personally never struggled with alcoholism or saw himself as a figure of suppressed abuse? Not if those feelings are conveyed all the same. And they are — as urgently and as intensely as anything Cronenberg ever made.

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